by Charles Todd
The Germans, Rutledge thought helplessly, had got him after all.
And Hamish, aware of the grief and the pain and the horror of what had happened, said, “Look well. See yoursel’. If it’s no’ the Germans waiting, it will be me.”
Rutledge stood there for an instant, frozen, seeing in his mind’s eye his own shattered face lying on one arm out-flung across the bare wood.
27
Rutledge made himself walk into the room and look at the sheet of paper under Simon’s arm, although he had guessed what was written on it. It was addressed to Hildebrand. It said only, “You were wrong. I blacked out and killed them both. She didn’t know. It is better this way.” And the signature read, with a flourish, Simon Wyatt.
Rutledge softly swore, the waste of a man’s life shocking him.
Aurore was kneeling beside her husband, her arm across his shoulder, saying “He’s still warm, there must be a pulse, if I can stop the bleeding—”
Elizabeth was clinging to the door frame, sobbing heavily, her eyes unable to look away.
Rutledge bent to Aurore, touched her shining hair briefly, gently, then forced her to let Simon go, lifting her to her feet, turning her to face him. “He’s dead, Aurore. He’s dead, there’s nothing you can do.”
She buried her face against him then, and he thought she was going to cry, like Elizabeth. But she was only searching for strength, her body at the point of breaking, her mind already broken.
She said, “I was so afraid. I was so afraid that one day—And now I’ll never need to be afraid again.”
She let him lead her out of the room but seemed unaware of the chair he seated her on or the handkerchief he thrust into her hands.
Elizabeth refused to go, clinging to the door, her eyes unable to leave the crumpled shoulders, the untidy fair hair, the great black stain of blood.
Rutledge finally got her to move back into the museum, and that was when she straightened, seeming to tower in her anger, and loosed the storm of it at Aurore.
“It’s your fault, you killed him! You took him away from all he knew and all he wanted, and made him into what you believed he ought to be, and in the end, it killed him. He needn’t have died but for you and your damned, selfish blindness! I hope you’re satisfied, I hope his spirit haunts you every day of life and breath left to you and that you never, never, know what happiness is, ever again!”
Rutledge went to her and shook her hard, until she broke into tears again and sank in the chair he quickly shoved toward her. Burying her head in her hands, she began to moan Simon’s name, over and over, like a litany.
Aurore, white and strained, still hadn’t cried. She looked up at Rutledge, her eyes filled with ineffable pain, and said only, “He didn’t do it.”
“You thought he had. He thought you had. He killed himself because he couldn’t face losing you, he couldn’t face the scandal, he couldn’t face another change in his life. He was trying to protect you.”
“Hildebrand came to him today—”
“I don’t know how Simon knew of the suitcase. Whether he put it there—or found it there. If it’s any comfort to you—”
He broke off as the door opened and Joanna Daulton came through the outer rooms toward them. Her hair still pinned up, the white streak like a blazon, but she was wearing a robe over her nightdress. She looked from Aurore to Elizabeth, saying something about the fire, and then seemed to shrink into herself as she took in what their faces told her as they lifted to hers. “Simon?” she asked Rutledge. “Gentle God! Where!”
He nodded toward the back room, then said, “Don’t go.”
She walked past him without a word and into the small office, staying only for a moment. He thought he heard her saying words of prayer from the service for the dead. Then she turned, her face chalk white, and said, “What can I do?”
“Will you call Hildebrand for me? Ask him to come directly. And then if you would, you might find some help for Miss Napier and Mrs. Wyatt. I think both have been through enough for one night. They need tea, warmth—comfort.”
“I’ll see to it,” she said, but some of her usual efficient crispness was gone. “I loved him,” she added simply, “I watched him grow from childhood. I thought, if I had another son, that’s what I’d want him to be. Someone like Simon.” She shook her head, as if to clear it. “I hope he’s at rest—I hope he’s at peace!” Her voice broke, and she went out the door, leaving him with the two women while she made the necessary arrangements.
Aurore said, “This has changed nothing in our bargain. I will not have this put at Simon’s door. Do you hear me?” It was as if she hadn’t taken in what he’d been saying earlier.
“Aurore—”
“No. He will not be remembered as a murderer. If there is a paper saying so in that room, please, for the love of God, destroy it. Don’t let it destroy him!”
“I can’t destroy evidence!”
“Then I will.”
She got to her feet and was nearly to the door of the smaller room before he caught her, his hands on her arms.
“Aurore. Listen to me. It isn’t over yet. Give me time! If you destroy that letter, you will probably hang. And he died to prevent that. Can you understand me?”
“He died because he couldn’t endure any more pressure from anyone.”
He made a swift and measured decision. “Come with me. Back to the house. I must lock this wing until Hildebrand arrives.” He took Elizabeth’s arm, supporting her, while Aurore—Aurore the widow—walked unaided by his side, one foot placed precisely in front of the other, as if she were half alive. It was always the Elizabeths of this world, he thought in a distant corner of his mind, around whom people gathered in a crisis, offering sympathy and comfort and human warmth. They seemed so vulnerable and helpless. And yet the Elizabeths were often tougher than all the rest, more deeply centered on how the crisis deprived them than moved by unbearable grief. How did you comfort Aurore, when you knew that even touching her was anathema? That beneath the incredible strength lay stark despair.
He locked the museum door with the key he found there and escorted both women across the front gardens. The side of his face was beginning to hurt, where the flames had seared it.
By the time they reached the house, Elizabeth was near to collapse. That spoke volumes to Rutledge—he understood clearly what she had done—and how it would affect the remainder of her life. And so did she. Simon’s death lay at her door as much as at Hildebrand’s. If she hadn’t meddled—if she hadn’t tried to bring him back to her somehow—anyhow—again and again …
When Elizabeth had been settled on the sofa in the quiet parlor, a pillow under her head and the light shielded with a shawl, he turned toward the door.
Aurore said, “Where are you going? I want to know. I want to go with you.”
“I’m not going to London. Only as far as the church. I want to see this hiding place. Aurore, tell me the truth. You found the hat, didn’t you? Where?”
She shook her head, stubbornly adhering to the story she’d given him.
And she stubbornly followed Rutledge to the church, as if afraid he’d leave her, breaking their bargain. Or afraid that left alone, she couldn’t hide from grief any longer?
Inside, the candles still burned and the odor of incense was very strong. It took him some time to find the stairs to the crypt, hidden in a corner of a side aisle. As Simon had done before, he took a candle to light his way down the narrow, crumbling steps and into the cool stone chamber that had once been a small church, its heavy pillars squat, its arches broad and ugly rather than graceful. Sturdy, strong enough to support the building that had been put up over it, windowless and bare, almost spiritually bleak, the crypt now served to house the dead. Wyatts for the most part, but there were others as well, he could see eight or ten tombs spaced unevenly around two walls, leaving the center of the stone-paved floor empty.
Along the other walls were stored a broken pew, bits of stone from rebuilding,
boxes of hymnals, shovels and picks for digging graves, containers for flowers, lengths of canvas, buckets—all the oddments of death and burial. You could see, he thought, that nothing could be hidden among or behind them.
Neither he nor Aurore had spoken.
At one end of the crypt was a stone altar with no grace. A monolithic slab with a vine pattern running around it set upon three square, heavy stones. An altar cloth, thin from damp and age, draped the stones, covering them to the floor. In the center of the top was a squat stone cross, powerful in its roughness. A bronze vase, empty, stood to one side, as if waiting for flowers. And under the altar cloth, as it hung like a tent, was a narrow three-sided rectangle, the back open.
He went there and knelt on one knee to look more closely at it. It yawned, empty.
The dark space was large enough for a suitcase like Margaret Tarlton’s, or for a small boy gleefully escaping from adult supervision. But who had put the suitcase in there?
He thought he had part of the answer now. He felt heavy with sadness.
Aurore was just behind him, staying close in the pale light of her own candle, her breath uneven, as if the place disturbed her. He thought she might be sorry she had come now. But she stooped to look at the small space too and then gasped as another voice spoke. It seemed to rise from the ground under their feet, although that was a trick of the echo.
It was Henry, on the stairs, saying, “My mother told me about Simon. I’m sorry. She’s very upset, she feels responsible.” He didn’t have a candle.
Yes, she would, Rutledge thought. The final tragedy in her life.
Rutledge straightened up and came across the uneven floor toward Henry. “Was this your hiding place? Was this the place from which Simon Wyatt took the suitcase tonight?”
Henry said, “I’d rather not tell you. Let the dead lie in peace.”
“It will help Simon. He isn’t guilty; neither is Aurore.”
Henry frowned, a move that emphasized the deep scar. “But it will harm someone else, won’t it? It will hurt me.”
“That very much depends on why it was put here, as well as by whom.”
Henry came down the last of the steps and moved across the crypt, the candle flames dancing with his passage. “It would have been safer over here,” he said, coming to a stop in front of one of the tombs there. “The suitcase.”
The low rectangular stone vault was small, plain. The top was engraved with a name, date, and a few lines of scripture. But no figures at the sides supported it, and no designs ran like filigree either across the top or down the corners. It seemed to squat on the floor, out of place among its more ornate brethren, as if unfinished.
“The end stone here isn’t sealed. The tomb’s actually empty, did you know? It belonged to the wife of another Simon Wyatt, some three hundred years ago. The next wife didn’t want her to lie here in Charlbury and had the body sent to Essex. It’s one of the family skeletons, in a manner of speaking.”
He stooped by the tomb and pushed one side of the stone that marked the foot. It scraped across the floor but moved with fair ease. “You wouldn’t have needed much of a space, to slip a suitcase in there. But most people can’t tell it’s free. I knew. Even my father didn’t.”
Rutledge said quietly, “You couldn’t have moved that as boys. It was too heavy. Would it be too heavy for a woman?” He was thinking of Aurore.
“Probably not. If she knew about it. The old sexton showed it to me when I was six or seven. He had a ghoulish nature; he said I’d wind up here if I misbehaved in church. Rather a cruel thing to tell a child, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It was.” To one side of Rutledge, Aurore stood with that stillness of hers that he so admired.
Henry frowned, thinking. “I must have told Simon about these hiding places. That’s how he could find the suitcase, when he came looking tonight. I asked him what he was searching for, and he said it was a suitcase no one else wanted. He said Aurore had put it here, but she hadn’t”
Aurore, turning to Rutledge, opened her mouth to speak and stopped.
“No, I don’t believe she had put it here either.” Rutledge said, his voice attuned to Henry’s mood. “Who did? Do you know?”
Henry shook his head. “It was in the attic for a time.”
“Whose attic? Simon’s?”
“No, of course not. It came from my mother’s.”
“How did she come to have it? It didn’t belong to her. Did you give it to her?”
“She brought it home one day. I asked her where it came from, and she said it was better if I didn’t worry about it. There was another one too, but she put that one on a train from Kingston Lacey to Norfolk. I expect she wanted to put this one on a train too but hadn’t had time.”
Where do you hide a suitcase? Where there are other suitcases.…
Aurore was staring at Henry. She said, “How did Simon know that the suitcase was here?”
“I don’t believe he did. He’d searched the farmhouse. And the barn. After the inspector here had gone this afternoon. Then he came here, to search the church. I don’t think he was very pleased to find it.”
“No,” Rutledge said. “I shouldn’t have thought he was at all pleased. It proved something he didn’t want to believe. I think—Henry, it’s time we found your mother.”
“Why?”
“Mrs. Wyatt needs her.”
Henry said, “I like Mrs. Wyatt. She doesn’t know it, but I’ve watched her often. I like pretty hair. Hers is very pretty.”
Rutledge, standing very still, said softly, “Aurore, will you trust me? Let your hair down. Slowly. Give me the candle.”
After an instant’s hesitation, she handed it to him and slowly began to unpin her hair, collecting the pins in her teeth. The knot at the back of her neck loosened and unwound. As she took the pins in her left hand her hair spilled in long gleaming waves, falling over her shoulders nearly to her waist. She looked at Rutledge, frowning but unafraid. Her hair was not pretty—it was beautiful.
Henry, mesmerized, sucked in his breath and walked toward her, his eyes shining in the light. His hand moved, reaching, then drew back. “You won’t scream if I touch it?” he said to Aurore. And to Rutledge he said, “I like to touch it. But it always makes them scream, and I hate that part.”
“No,” Rutledge said firmly, “you can’t touch it tonight.” Henry stopped where he was, uncertain. Rutledge passed one of his candles to Aurore, her face white and stark now, and stepped into Henry’s path. “Mrs. Wyatt, would you mind fetching Mrs. Daulton for me? You should find her at your house, with Elizabeth. Ask her to come here, but don’t come back with her, do you understand?”
“Ian—” she began, moving toward the stairs.
“There’s no need, I’m here,” Joanna Daulton said, coming down the crypt steps. Dressed now, composed, she stood there, blocking the only exit from the low-ceilinged, cold stone undercroft of the old church, another candle in her hand, and Rutledge felt himself succumbing to the numbing fear of being shut in, cut off from the outside air. Hamish was urgently telling him to pay heed—
In Mrs. Daulton’s left hand, half hidden by her skirts and the shadows, was the straw hat that had belonged to Margaret Tarlton.
Aurore was moving closer to Rutledge, one hand fumbling at her hair, gathering it together. But Joanna Daulton said, “You needn’t be afraid, my dear. Henry never hurts anyone. He just has a fascination about seeing a woman’s hair flowing down her back. I don’t think he even understands why this compulsion is there. The physical implications. Nor does he understand that respectable women don’t care for such attentions. He only wants to touch, and to him that’s hot—wrong. Like a child wanting to touch something very pretty, he sometimes can’t stop himself.” The last words seemed to be wrenched from her.
“He tries to choke them when they scream,” Rutledge said.
“Yes, it frightens him, he tries to shut them up. If they stood still, he’d stop at once. But that’s as far as
it ever goes. He never does any harm.”
“He tried, tonight, to choke Elizabeth Napier.”
“Yes.” She turned tiredly toward Aurore. “I wouldn’t have had Simon die for anything in the world,” she said, her voice heavy with sorrow. “I mean that, Aurore. I never intended for any such thing to happen.”
“I shall have to take Henry in for questioning,” Rutledge said. “Will he understand what I’m doing and why?”
“Of course he will,” Joanna said sharply. “He’s not a fool. But it won’t be necessary. He didn’t kill those women. I did.”
He looked at her, infinite pity in his eyes. To protect her son …
“How many have there been?”
“It started in London. I’d taken rooms near the hospital while Henry was there recovering, and they’d let him out of hospital, in my care, with a nurse to come three days a week. He tried once to unpin her hair, and she screamed, and he choked her. She was very angry, she threatened to tell the doctors, to have Henry put away. I gave her a great deal of money and bought her passage on a ship leaving for New Zealand. And that was that. Afterward, I watched him very carefully. But when Betty came to the house, to tell me that Simon was giving her an introduction to the Napiers, Henry was alone with her in the parlor. I was finishing the washing up. I didn’t know, I thought he was out. I didn’t know until I heard her scream. I offered her what money I had and told her she’d be better off going to London with a small fortune in her pocket than settling for being a maid to the Napiers. And she went. But the money didn’t last. She came back, demanding more.”
Joanna Daulton shuddered. “I couldn’t give her any more. I didn’t have any more to give. But she was a greedy little bitch, she threatened to have Henry put away, and in the end I had no choice but to kill her. It was horrible. I hated myself, I hated her, I hated having to connive and lie and live with such a thing on my conscience. I told myself, in future I shall never let him out of my sight again, I’ll watch even more closely. It won’t happen again, I could see he was showing great improvement—”
